The Wildwood What Happened Here?

Honey brown eyes blinked slowly as the female approached the tree line, her coffee colored fur helping her blend readily into the forest. She walked slowly, unsure of what she was coming across. The smell of death lingered in the air, but it was a foreign smell. It was not the scent of a kill or disease, it was something else. Something she had never come across in her two years of life.

The closer she came, the darker things became. The bark of the trees around her morphed from browns to black and grey, their foliage becoming less and less as she continued. The more she walked, the more things died, and the less she felt safely camouflaged within a thick living forest. Her heart beat grew faster, the fear of the unknown gripping her. Her stomach clenched slightly, as she could tell the scent of death had lingered here for a long time. Finally, she had reached the edge of the thick forest.

What she saw made her heart jump to her throat in an emotion she wasn't ready to decipher. It felt like fear, or sadness, or perhaps both put together. For miles, all she could see was - she didn't know. Dark black dirt covered the earth, crawling up the broken and dead trees. The canopy was gone, and left in its wake was a sky that should never have been seen from this spot. The air was thick with a thin layer of the dust, and it hit her nose and burned her lungs. She took a breath, and then a step. Her single paw let way to a swirl of the thin charred floor in the air, and it stuck to the short hairs of her leg like it was clinging to whatever life it could find.

Thoughts rushed through her. She had so many questions, but there was one that kept gripping her and not letting her go; What happened here?

The mountain had sated his voracious curiosity well enough for the few weeks Rais had been dwelling in the pass, but it was only a matter of time before the familiar wandering itch spread through his paws. Nomad's Pass was his home now, and he would return for the safety, comfort, and food the pack provided. He wouldn't let the mountain pack smother him, however, and on a whim he meandered his way down the snowy slopes and into the valley's woods.

The yearling's rangy grey limbs picked over the charred debris of the forest, happy face and swaying tail at odds with the solemn ruins. Just beneath the smokey residue he could smell a she-wolf in the woods, and he turned towards her scent with an idea coming together in his mind. His pointed teeth glinted with a sneaky grin, his bouncy gait shifting low and measured as he made his approach. He nestled in to a hidden vantage point, a spiney dry scrub that had either lost all its leaves to winter, or simply never grew anymore after the fire.

In the distance he could see a chocolaty brown female cautiously moving through the scarred woods. She reminded him so much of the pair of nervous men he had scared the wits right out of on a previous midnight visit to the burned wildwood. Why everyone seemed to fear this forest, he couldn't tell. After all, it was dead. Ashes and bones held no agency, and weren't worth fearing. Rais was an opportunistic little wolf, and could use her fear for his amusement. Nothing cruel, at least that wasn't his intention. Just shake up the lady's world a bit.

He waited untill she had moved out of sight before he slipped out of his hiding place and trailed quietly after her paw prints. Rais made every effort at silence, following enough a distance behind that he could not be immediately seen by a backwards glance, keeping at least a skeleton tree or two between them. He hoped that she might catch him in the periphery of her senses, instill a sense of being followed, but for her benefit he deliberately let his paw fall heavily on a thin twig. Snap!

Honey brown eyes scanned the scene. There was so much of nothing, it was unlike anything she had ever seen before. How was she supposed to comprehend it, when she did not know it? In her previous life she had never seen fire, or ash, or death on such a scale. Where she had grown up in her pack, nothing like this had ever happened. It was unknown and it was new, and it was the type of unknown that was terrifying instead of exciting. Nothing good happened here, that she could tell. It was all she needed to be able to tell to be frightened.

Occupied with her own fear and compelled by some sort of sick curiosity, she was too distracted to notice the small male as he made a wide circle around her. The smell of charred earth was too thick in her nostrils for her to pick him out readily. He was only found out with the snap of a twig, at which Lune's whole body flinched with adrenaline.

Her eyes were quickly on him, ears erect and focused. She was not overtly gestural to him, trying her best to keep a calm and relaxed look about her. Her tail hung below her with only a slight tension to it, and the hairs on her neck slowly bristled upwards. With her head facing towards him, she slowly took a few steps to be sideways against him. Once she reached her desired position she stopped and stared.

Without a word she searched him with her eyes. What were his intentions?

(This post was last modified: Jan 28, 2013, 11:04 PM by Lune.)

On cue the brown female spun around to face him, and Rais met her steady stare with a wide toothy grin, crooked teeth glinting. His paws worked to keep him facing her as she walked around him, with his black ears cupped alert and towards her. He wondered with anticipation what she might do now, but was rather disappointed to see she didn't do much of anything. She didn't scream or run or even get angry, which gave the boy little in the way of entertainment. A silence stretched out, only broken by the rustling of his paws fidgeting in place.

His limp tail swayed at his ankles as he took an enterprising step towards the female, his head tilting slightly as he watched her. His initial grin settled to a more serious pull of his dark lips. "You know, it's dangerous to be walking through here alone," he remarked, as if he were being helpful. His tangerine bright eyes roved left and right, as if he were looking for eavesdroppers.

"Something evil lurks in this forest," He revealed in a low voice. "I've seen many go in here, and never come back out." His face was utterly grave and serious, and if it wasn't for the facade he was trying to hold up at the moment, he would have felt like laughing. It was such an outright lie that he had just told this woman, and he wondered if she'd believe it. From his loner days spent in the Wildwood he knew the place to be quite safe, at least from such monsters as he had indicated, but he doubted this apparent traveler would know that.